Röhan’s Reviews > Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II > Status Update

There is no disgrace great enough to make a man lose heart if he bears in mind that at the end of certain number of years our buried mistakes will be but invisible dust upon which nature's flowers will smile peacefully.

Something which being common to the past and the present, is more essential than both. How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent.

I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still hot and damp from the press in the murky air of the morning in which it is distributed, at break of day, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating into every house at once.

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone.

I might, if I chose, take Albertine upon my knee, take her head in my hands; I might caress her, pass my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.

'Decidedly, Baron', said Brichot, 'should the Board of Studies ever think of founding a Chair of Homosexuality, I shall see that your name is the first to be submitted. No, an Institute of Psycho-physiology would suit you better. And I can see you best of all, provided with a Chair in the College de France, which would enable you to devote your energy to sexual research like the Professor of Tamil or Sanskrit.

Love is too strong a word, pleasure that is at all deeply rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasure of society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by doing so, the surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming stagnant.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0CLY...

People could be cured for ever of romanticism if they could make up their minds, in thinking of the girl they love, to try to be the man they will be when they are no longer in love with her.